Chapter 17 Goran
GORAN
The night she was taken out to sea and given back tied to my best friend was one of the longest of my life.
She’d called me Gorgeous again, without even realizing it. She’d let me carry her, hold her. Being around her was dangerous.
I’d never stopped loving her. I never would. But she was an obsession I had to conquer.
Lachlan came with me that night to the camp, making sure my men were safe from the storm. Then he joined me in polishing off three bottles of potato whiskey before we were able to sleep in the gale.
The storm brought unseasonal ice and snow, along with an oppressive malevolence that seeped through the tent flaps, and there was more than enough to do to make sure the horses and the men stayed alive.
Since there wasn’t shit we could do about mythical ice beasts, I’d only told a few of my trusted trainers about the possibility of there being a magical element to it.
Lachlan slipped away the next day, heading toward the sea with his pelt tied around his waist. Five days later, he came back in the evening. “It’s gone.” His golden-tipped hair was wild, and dark circles ringed his eyes. “I followed it almost to the Svellvollr. It’s gone far north.”
I gave him food and drink and expected him to return to the house, but he headed back to the sea after the sun set. “Lachlan, where are you going?” He didn’t answer, but the slump in his shoulders made it clear that he was in no state to be alone.
My own heart heavy, I walked the path to the house, needing to call on Kellin to swim after his brother. Someone needed to.
I didn’t make it inside. Halfway down the garden, a small window was open, and the only scent that ever brought tears to my eyes stopped me and drew me toward the stone wall. On the other side was the bathing room.
And her.
I’d thought the hell I’d be consigned to after death would be fiery. But a deeper hell was here, the middle of Lachlan’s mint patch, with the scent of everything I’d lost in my life rising up all around me, and the only one who could return it to me as out of my reach as the moon.
Mint and rain. I sucked in breath after breath of it, my cock going stiff instantly and my knot throbbing in my trousers.
The irony of it almost made me laugh. Lachlan had planted extra mint in his garden when he’d noticed me carrying a sprig of it into my tent one night.
I’d lied and told him it was for my tea.
The truth was I’d hardly been able to reach a climax in a decade without those scents in my nose. Her Omega perfume.
The rain had stopped during the day, but started again as I lurked there. The night wind whipped my wet braids against my cheeks like it was administering a punishment, and I wondered if I deserved it.
After all, I was a warrior, full of honor and pride.
I’d been so full of honor, I’d let the woman I loved more than life itself leave me because I had promised to let her go.
I’d been so full of pride, I hadn’t followed her, even when my heart told me to run to her.
No, I’d waited for an excuse, for Levi to call upon me to fulfill a debt, as if breaking one vow was mitigated by fulfilling the other.
“Nineteen! Kellin, how do you do this?” she gasped out inside, the barely-opened window allowing her voice to seep through.
Her voice and her scent, honeyed mint and musk, mingled with the icy rain that died down every time she spoke, though that could have been my imagination.
“Five nights now?” She laughed. No, she giggled.
Damnit to all the hells, that was my giggle.
“I’m making a map of your body,” the selkie—who had once been my friend, but who I was now planning a thousand ways to murder—replied, his voice more confident than I’d ever heard. “I have to explore every inch of you to do so, of course. Huh. I think I discovered a new valley… here.”
More giggles.
This was Kellin? If it had been Lachlan, I would’ve believed it.
Lachlan was boisterous, almost cocksure.
But his quiet older brother apparently gave new meaning to the word.
Cocksure? If he’d fucked her nineteen times…
No, the selkie mating ritual called for twenty-eight orgasms, for twenty-eight nights.
He’d been giving them to her for five nights now.
My mind clicked through the numbers as a murderous haze threatened to fall over it. I breathed deeply, remembering whose fault it was that I stood out here, while he lay in there with her. Pleasuring her. Driving into…
I had almost no time to pull my cock free of my trousers before I came, leaning against the cold stone wall, without even touching myself. Just smelling and hearing her.
Her voice pierced the buzzing in my mind. “Remember, no fucking. No matter what I say later. I can’t… I made a…”
“I promised I wouldn’t fuck you, my queen. These nights are not about me or my pleasure.” The wind whistled again, slapping the bone bead of one of my braids against my ear. I rubbed away the sting and slumped on the wall.
Fuck. He was only counting her orgasms? He hadn’t come once?
I sighed. I punched the wall with my fist, then slid that hand into my trousers to grip my aching knot, knowing the pain would only get worse. I listened as she came and he counted, and wondered if there was any way I could fight and kill numbers. Each number stabbed me in the gut.
My thoughts grew indistinct as I came three more times against the wall, breathing in as heavily as I could. My cock would not soften, and I wondered… Was I going mad, or going into a rut? I hadn’t had one of those since I was a young man.
I’d done what Rada and I had begun in our year together, and helped most of the young Alphas of Starlak reverse the descent in madness without being tied up during their first ruts.
The herbal mixtures Wren had provided had been the key, and as long as young males had some of it in the first days of that initial rut, they all recovered.
Many of their fathers, uncles, and older brothers had gone feral and died before we had enough of the remedy for every village, though, and there had been too many young warrior Alphas to leave without guidance in how to be an honorable Alpha.
Honor. I was so close to losing my honor as she gasped out another climax, it was almost laughable. I let my fingers trace the gold bars that lined my shaft, reminders of what I’d done for her before I’d even known her body for the first time.
I’d done it for her, and it had hurt for months. I’d wondered more than once if I was the biggest fool in the world, but when she’d taken me into her small, confident hand, her eyes wide with laughter and awe, and led me by my pierced cock to her bed…
“Twenty-seven,” Kellin murmured. “Goddess, you’re beautiful. Someday, I pray you will allow me to watch you come on my cock.”
“Can’t… I promised…”
The air around me went even more still. What she’d started to say at the table echoed, and I let myself hope in the dark. Was it possible that she hadn’t been with another man since she’d left me?
We’d made vows when we married under the moon, in the sight of the Goddess. I closed my eyes, remembering what I’d said like it was yesterday.
“Goran, your braids are beautiful,” she murmured as she worked behind me. I tried to twist my head around to see what beads she’d chosen for the first braids that would mark me as hers, but she thumped my head. “No peeking.”
“Do you like yours?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
She’d squealed when I put them in and sniffled when I told her the story of each one.
My mother’s wedding ring had been melted down to make three gold beads, with our initials intertwined on one, and the traditional runes for happiness and health on the other two.
I’d had the gemstones I’d taken from my treasury worked into the gold of three more, to honor her place as Warqueen.
My grandmothers and great-grandmother’s rings made up more carved beads, telling a silent story of my line, their battles and histories. I’d wanted to mate in the traditional way of Starlakian Alphas, with marks and a feast, but I knew why it wasn’t possible.
I could smell why it wasn’t. The longer we were together, the more enticing she became. She almost glowed with an otherworldly allure at times, especially on nights like this one when the air was filled with the scent of rain and mint.
“I’m done. You can stand up and turn around.” I did just that and held out a hand for her. The light fell on her naked skin as she stared at me, looking up almost shyly. “What do you think?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to expect. She was an orphan, with no ancestral heirlooms to beat into bead shapes. But I gasped when I saw what she’d done.
“Ma bohinya,” I whispered, my finger moving over the beads at the ends of each braid.
She hadn’t carved runes in hers. Instead, she’d made nests of gold wire that wrapped around each braid…
but also around a dragon’s hoard of riches.
She’d given me ten braids, each one bearing a king’s ransom in jewels.
“They’re not the ones we stole,” she muttered when I gawked for too long.
“These ones I was given by King Rigol and Vilkurn before I left home, from back when I was declared a duchess. The diamonds I had for a lot longer; Queen Vali slipped them to me for rescuing the king, not long after they mated.”
“I will treasure them forever,” I said, my voice raw as I took her in. “I’ll never take them off.”
The moonlight was all that illuminated us, since she’d insisted on no fires for this ceremony, but it was enough for me to see. She was every inch a princess, though her frame was narrower and more elegant than most of my country’s women. She was perfect for me, though. “Are you ready?”